Why do it? Why did I do it? It is not the first of this ‘type’ that I have done. Firstly, I like thick paint - why do I like thick paint? I like thick paint because it makes the canvas into a ‘thing”. Why does that please me? It is, I suppose because I enjoy taking part in the creation of something out of nothing and so not only is it visible, it is tangible, tactile looking and comprehensive. (as an aside one of the nicknames the family have for me is double-mixture which at the very least explains the quantities involved. (I always add too many ingredients to any food I prepare). That said, it also feels good when the palette knife is skimming over the canvas in an unpredictable fashion, distributing swaths of colour and those colours react with each other in an unpredictable way. This prompts an inexplicable reaction of something buried in my psyche that I cannot usually access. If I consider could I have done this painting with intention and purpose and deliberately ‘placed’ the marks and evaluated the colour relationships and textures to create such an image - it seems clear to me that I would not have produced such a result. There is no facility in my conscious cognitive process that would have been capable of ‘working out’ that this particular combination would work and produce the effect. I find that exciting because I am weary with purposeful control, it is boring, compliant and entirely responsive to external influences. Of course it has to be the default modus operandi for most people, myself included, in fact it describes most of what I recognise about myself, I have been around a long time and exercising control both of myself and the world I exist in is one of the most dominant features of my life thus far.
The lack of control on my part in the creation of such a painting gives it a sort of ‘otherness’ which I realise intrigues me as like most people, I am so ‘used to’ me, that this deviation feels a bit more substantial somehow or at the very least an alternative to the expected.